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Hi @BrandonK , I hope you’re enjoying the Fretboard Wizard course. I was fortunate enough to be one of the first “FW students” in this iteration of the course. The patterns that you’re asking about are the patterns to find the NEXT SAME NOTE on the fretboard. For instance, let’s start with an open B string or a B note. Where is the next closest B note? According to Tony’s formula, we need to skip one fret (toward the body of the guitar) and skip 2 strings (toward the ceiling) to find the next B note. To work that out, we skip the 1st fret and goto the 2nd fret, then we skip the G & D strings and goto the A string and there is the answer – A string 2nd fret = the next closest B note. And that works for any note along the B string, that next closest note will be on the A string 2 frets toward the body from the note on the B string. And Tony explained the relationship from all the strings to another string to find the next closest same note. The downside is that this requires a lot of memorization, skipping frets and skipping strings. But I found a much easier way to find the next closest same note, without all of that memorization. In fact, you just need to remember 1 word and 1 number. The word is “B A G E D” (almost caged, but not quite). This word is the order of string names, the order in which you go from one string to the next to find the next closest same note all along the fretboard, and it works like the musical alphabet. If we have a note on the A string and we want to find the next closest same note going forward (toward the body), we’ll find it on the G string. And if we want to go backward (toward the head stock) from that note on the A string, we’ll find it on the B string. Like I said, this works just like the musical alphabet. Now for the number, it’s 11212. This number represents the number of frets to skip between the strings. If we combine the number with the word, we have B(1)A(1)G(2)E(1)D(2)B. That right there is the whole ball of wax pertaining to finding the NEXT SAME CLOSEST NOTE.
I hope this helps make the concept more clear Brandon!